Delivering immeasurable volumes of snark about movies and anything else that pops into my head

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Review: "The Fate of the Furious"

As we already knew from the movies, you can outrun an
explosion, provided it happens in slo-mo. Now from “The Fate of the Furious,”
the franchise that started out about illegal street racers and somehow morphed
into full James Bond-esque international intrigue and action set pieces, we
learn you can block an explosion simply by parking a car in front of it.

I know, I know; nitpicking the “Fast and the Furious”
franchise, now in its astonishing eighth iteration, is like criticizing the
dancing bear’s form. People pay to see it because it does what it does, not
because it’s particularly good at it or whether the whole enterprise makes a
lick of sense.

The thing is, people got hooked on these movies because they
combined hot rods, bulging muscles, macho preening, hoochie mamas and lots of
hard-throttle racing. Most of that has gone by the wayside in “Fate.” Oh, there
are a few cool cars, and neither Vin Diesel nor Dwayne Johnson seem to own any
shirts that include sleeves.

But at this point the Furious movies are big, messy,
sprawling orgies of pomposity and ridiculousness. It’s all about Russian
separatists and nuclear codes and elite cyber hackers and no-name American spy
agencies. There are eight gazillion characters, and apparently we’re supposed
to be able to remember some sideshow guys from four movies ago.

When last we left Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and his “family”
of driver/robbers, they’d finally found some peace after pulling off one last
big job. We learn they’ve been staying in Havana, which in this depiction is a
true socialist paradise of cruising cars and women with cheeks hanging out of
their skirts.

Dom gets a visit from Cipher, a computer hacker and
criminal mastermind, played with hollow eyes and a taunting smirk by Charlize Theron.
She shows him an image on her phone, and as a result he turns his back on his
crew and becomes her mercenary in some very big heists against the Russian
military. His actions are so bewildering, his friends keep wondering aloud:
“Has Dominic Toretto finally gone rogue?”

Hint: Dominic Toretto has not gone rogue.

You may remember the other players: Michelle Rodriguez is
Letty, Dom’s fiery lady love, now wife; Johnson is Luke Hobbs, a special ops
badass who used to chase Dom & Co. but now allies with them; Tyrese Gibson
is Roman, the wisecracking, cowardly one; Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is Tej, the
brainy tech expert; Nathalie Emmanuel is Ramsey, a hacktivist who created some
spying software called God’s Eye in the last movie and now fends off lame
sexual innuendo from Roman and Tej.

Jason Statham returns as Shaw, a bad guy for at least one
other movie, maybe two. (I really can’t remember.) Now he and Hobbs are in jail
together for about a minute and a half, then they’re forced to team up against
Cipher. They keep threatening to have a fistfullicious throwdown when their temporary alliance
is ended; it gives us something to look forward to.

Kurt Russell shows up as the helpful spy guy pulling some
strings, and Scott Eastwood is his dorky young apprentice who eventually wises
up. I get the sense Eastwood is being groomed to assume the role of Bland
Straitlaced White Guy vacated by Paul Walker.

The movie, directed by F. Gary Gray from a script by Chris
Morgan, is big, loud and dumb, but perhaps not big and loud enough for its own good.
There’s an astonishing amount of jabbering and people tapping away furious on
computer keyboards. This is one of those movies where virtually every object in
the world can be controlled by computers, including an army of self-driving
cars and even a nuclear submarine.

(Quibble: If you leave the hatch of a sub open, as the
characters clearly do, it tends to flood when it submerges. OK, I’ll stop.)

There was one clever and funny bit where Shaw fights a bunch
of people on a plane while carrying a very important object, about which I’ll
say no more. It’s basically the movie’s MacGuffin, but cuter.

“The Fate of the Furious” is a transcendentally silly movie,
rock-headed and testosterone-fueled, but one not without its charms. The car stunts are fun, the bad guys are
hiss-able, and even the hyper-masculine peacocking gets so silly the guys start
laughing at each other in between boasts and threats.

I wish the thing was 40 minutes shorter. Come to think of
it, I wish they’d stopped making these two or three movies ago. But I hear two
more are coming, whether we like it or not. Just pay your money and clap for
the bear.